


Keep My Distance

by makbaes (gentlemindedlostgirl)



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, College, Friends With Benefits, Graduate School, Light Angst, M/M, Pining, They both study literature, lil saucy but not really, will andy ever learn to tag?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-23
Updated: 2018-11-23
Packaged: 2019-08-28 08:36:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,464
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16719984
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gentlemindedlostgirl/pseuds/makbaes
Summary: It wasn’t the first time Ten stretched himself awake in bed and found his foot knocking against Doyoung’s leg. In fact, it had happened about a dozen times since they had gotten vaguely tipsy one night and used it as an excuse to start doing the thing they had only ever joked about before. Kun had been so worried when Ten had first told him. "It’s just fun," Ten had assured. "We’re young, single, and horny. It’s fine."





	Keep My Distance

**Author's Note:**

> This is in the same universe as a Kun/Yukhei au I wrote. You don't need it for context, but can read it here: https://bit.ly/2r1jIzv
> 
> For reference:  
> 96 line are second year literature grad students. Kun is a Shakespearean, Ten is a Romantic, and Doyoung is an Americanist (especially Thoreau and Emerson).  
> Jaehyun is a first year literature grad student studying the Regency era.  
> Sicheng is a senior film major in undergrad because he took a gap year.  
> Yukhei is a junior math undergrad. He took an English class Kun was a TA for and they fell in love.

_I’ll make sure to keep my distance. Say ‘I love you’ when you’re not listening. How long can we keep this up? How long ‘till we call this love?_

 

It wasn’t the first time Ten stretched himself awake in bed and found his foot knocking against Doyoung’s leg. In fact, it had happened about a dozen times since they had gotten vaguely tipsy one night and used it as an excuse to start doing the thing they had only ever joked about before. Kun had been so worried when Ten had first told him. _It’s just fun,_ Ten had assured. _We’re young, single, and horny. It’s fine._

 _It’s fine,_ he was still assuring himself as he sat up in bed and rubbed the sleep out of his eyes. Being careful not to wake the still-sleeping Doyoung was _not_ domestic, he told himself. It was just the _not asshole_ thing to do. And it was _still_ not domestic that he was pulling on a pair of sweatpants and padding into the kitchen to make enough coffee for them both. Domesticity implied some sort of lingering romance.

Ten wasn’t in love with Doyoung. He _wasn’t._ He couldn’t love Doyoung. They would never work. Not in the long-term, “you’re my person” kind of way that Jaehyun and Sicheng were. Or the star-crossed “this won’t be easy but we’ll make it” kind of way that Kun and Yukhei had started to fall into. Ten and Doyoung were not carefully crafted sonnets or playlists for every mood or keeping the other’s favorite sweater waiting by the radiator so that it would be warm when they got back on a cold day.

Ten and Doyoung were nothing but mutually assured destruction. He had known that when he started kissing down his friend’s chest that first night. He had known it especially when he watched his head fall back, heard the prayer-like sigh that left his lips when Ten nipped at his thigh. This was doomed to fail.

When Ten looked back, he could see Doyoung through his open door. In Ten’s absence, he had strewn himself across the expanse of the bed. He always did that, took up as much room as Ten allowed. But never more. He never asked for too much. Ten leaned against the counter as the coffee brewed and gave himself permission to remark in the smoothness of Doyoung’s skin against his wine red bedsheets. That wasn’t a crime. The Romantics and the Aesthetes often overlapped. He could appreciate the beauty of Doyoung just for that. _Art for art’s sake,_ Wilde would say.

Doyoung blinked awake, a mix of the sunlight coming through the window and the aroma of the too-bitter coffee Ten had a penchant for brewing tickling his nose. He scrunched his nose and let out a small noise of discontent.

“Morning, sunshine,” Ten called as he grabbed his two biggest mugs from his cabinet.

“Fuck off,” Doyoung grumbled, the sound muffled by what Ten assumed was his comforter. Ten rolled his eyes, but he smiled anyway.

Ten knew exactly how Doyoung liked his coffee (a splash of milk and one spoonful of sugar on the weekdays. On weekends he made his coffee a little more light and sweet. The first time Ten asked him why Doyoung had said it was an act of treating himself. On the weekends he wasn’t downing the caffeine for the sake of waking up, but could take the time for languid sips and actually enjoy the taste), but made Doyoung make it himself anyway. It was a small way that he forced distance for himself between the physicality of what the two of them did together and the intimacy of it. He could let Doyoung into his apartment, into his bed, into all of the tiny corners of his life. But he wouldn’t make his coffee. He wouldn’t make him breakfast. There were parts of him that Ten refused to kiss because it toed the line of lowercase r romantic too closely. If Doyoung noticed, he never said anything. Such was the nature of their quasi-relationship.

Doyoung finally came into the kitchen, a light blue sweater pulled over his frame that clashed terribly with the sweatpants--a black pair of Ten’s that fit him horribly--that he had opted for. “How’re you not cold?” he mumbled, his voice still slurred from sleep.

Ten just shrugged and passed him a mug. “I’m used to it.”

Doyoung mumbled something incoherent as he made his coffee. Ten took this time to lean against the counter and start to sip at his own as he watched Doyoung work. He had deadlines coming up--both of them did. Ten knew that he should be getting right to work. He had people to email, research to do, and a bibliography to annotate. Lord Byron was demanding his attention, and who was Ten to keep him waiting?

But now Doyoung was looking at his phone while he drank his coffee. And he had apparently seen something funny because a lighthearted laugh left his lips which graced Ten with the briefest of glimpses of his gummy smile. He refused to believe that it made his chest ache. Ten took a deep breath and busied himself with his own phone to look over his to-do list and at least take a cursory glance over his inbox.

They eventually moved themselves to the small kitchen table. They didn’t have to discuss their migration--it was Saturday morning routine at this point. Both of them on their phones, Ten eventually dragging out his laptop because his advisor was getting increasingly petty with every new email and there was only so long that he could be ignored. Doyoung was more leisurely with his morning. Doyoung spent every weekday working from seven am until two am, he allowed his weekends to be slower.

Ten was heavily focused in on editing mode by the time Doyoung finally finished his drink--Ten’s own cup was long discarded and forgotten. Doyoung stood up from the table, both mugs in tow, and made his way over to the sink. Along the way, he attempted to steal a kiss from Ten. But Ten blocked his lips with his hand.

“You’ve got a mix of coffee and morning breath. Try again after you brush your teeth.”

Doyoung laughed as he went to place the mugs in the sink. “You’ve kissed me when I’ve had way worse tastes in my mouth.”

“Don’t be gross, it’s eleven am and I’m editing.”

“Byron would be disappointed in you for turning down quick, easy sex.”

“Byron isn’t breathing down my neck,” Ten countered. “Professor Lee _is._ ”

“Well,” Doyoung said as he walked in the direction of the bathroom. “When you decide you need a break, you know where to find one.”

Ten held himself rigid until he heard the bathroom door close. It was only then that he allowed himself to shudder. God damn Doyoung Kim and everything he stood for.

 

* * *

 

 

The break would come three hours later. Ten loved studying literature with every fiber of his being. He couldn’t imagine doing anything else. He found no greater joy in the world than when he would re-read the same poem he had gone over a thousand times but discovered something new. He loved learning new turns of phrase and figuring out how he could employ them himself within his own writing. He loved the solace that written words gave him, the quiet respite he could find within his favorite chair and a book in hand. The real world didn’t matter when he had someone else’s stories to fill his mind.

But sometimes if he stared at words for too long, they stopped looking like words and he couldn’t make sense of them anymore. There were times after he spent too much time reading that his mind would cloud over and he found his fingers typing on autopilot without his brain telling them to. He would sometimes find himself snapping out of a reverie to note that he had written five new pages but that he couldn’t remember what any of them had said. He could get away with that, most days. Nine times out of ten his dream writing mostly made sense with a tweak here and there. But he didn’t like doing it. He didn’t like handing in work he had only put a fraction of himself into.

So when he felt himself slipping into that headspace, he closed his laptop and pushed it away. He rested his forehead against the table and groaned as he massaged his temples. Doyoung, who had since _finally_ pulled out his own laptop and began his work, looked up with a knowing expression.

“Brain fog?” he asked, all too familiar with this mode of Ten’s process.

“Yeah,” he said softly.

“Come on, then,” he said, closing his book as he got up from the table. He grabbed Ten by the hand and pulled him up with some effort. Ten followed him back into the bedroom.

Most of the time when they got like this, it was Ten taking control. Ten was the one who demanded, and Doyoung let himself be something of a vessel for Ten to use to take, take, _take._ To practice all of his dirtiest, heathenistic fantasies.

Times like this were different. When Ten’s mind was in a cloud like this, his brain could not function enough to even decide what he wanted or needed. Instead, all he could do was lie back and let pure sensation take over as Doyoung hovered over him.

Ten, as a rule, did not let people see him vulnerable. Very few people were an exception to this rule. Kun, for example, had seen Ten cry three times in their six years of friendship. Once their senior year of undergrad when Ten had convinced himself that he wasn’t going to be accepted to a graduate program, once this year when Ten realized he had no idea what he actually wanted to do with his career, and once their sophomore year when Ten had gotten _truly_ wasted for the first time and confessed to Kun while he was practically curled around the toilet that he was never going to find someone who would love him.

Jaehyun had never seen him cry. The vulnerability from Ten that Jaehyun got to see was his insecurity about his writing. Ten labored impossibly over every punctuation in his prose but was never certain about its placement. Every word was chosen with precision until he went into brain fog but he hated everything he wrote. Jaehyun got to see Ten when he was ripping his hair out as he pressed the submit button on assignments because nothing Ten wrote was ever really _finished._

Doyoung got to see a different vulnerability. Doyoung got to see Ten unguarded when the Romantic would allow himself to slide into the fog of his mind and let Doyoung decide for him. This was not when they did anything kinky or adventurous. These were not the exploits Ten would tell their friends about later just so he could watch Doyoung’s face turn red with embarrassment as they realized that Doyoung was a _much_ bigger mess than any of them had previously thought to anticipate.

This was Ten letting Doyoung take care of him. Which was infinitely more dangerous than any of the other things they had done together--some of which might actually have bordered on the line of life-threatening.

When Doyoung kissed him, Ten forgot for a moment that he was supposed to be distancing himself. Instead, he gave into his touch. He let Doyoung undress him with practiced ease, sighed into every press of lips against skin. For a little while, Ten didn’t have to think. His mind, which was usually a constant cacophony of words and _noise_ but when Doyoung ran his hands up his thighs everything went quiet. Doyoung had learned how to map out Ten’s body and undo him until there was nothing he could think about but him.

For a few moments, Ten would let himself let himself be looked after. He supposed he could afford that.

  


* * *

 

 

“Better?” Doyoung asked, caring his hand through Ten’s hair while his head was resting on his chest.

“A little,” Ten hummed. His mind was in a bit of a different haze now, but that one would clear up shortly and then he would be able to get back to work. He had already lost too much time from this distraction. But he knew he wouldn’t have gotten any real work done then anyway.

“You’ll get it all done,” Doyoung said because he seemed to have the magical ability to read Ten’s mind. “You can let yourself enjoy a Saturday afternoon. Wouldn’t all of your Romantics want you to lavish in bodily decadence?”

“The decadents were a different movement,” Ten mumbled against his chest. “Some writers in common.”

“Oscar Wilde would tell you to stay in bed,” Doyoung said as he traced patterns into Ten’s skin.

“Doyoung--”

“I’m just saying, you’ve got to commit to your aesthetic.”

“Shouldn’t you be in the woods fucking some trees, then?”

“Touche,” Doyoung laughed.

Ten looked up at him, the kind, warm smile on his face. Felt the rumble of his laughter in his chest. And he knew he was screwed. He knew that this was crash and burn. That something like this could only end badly. This wasn’t like the romantic comedies that Kun loved. In the real world, you didn’t get to fall in love with one of your best friends and have everything go well. He couldn’t risk that. So he swallowed down his affection. It burned worse than any cheap alcohol he had used to drown it before.

He resented Wilde at that moment. Ten resented that he had ever read _The Picture of Dorian Gray_ and read the words “there was something tragic in a friendship so colored by romance”. Whenever Ten lay next to Doyoung too long he loathed his entire field of study. He hated that he spent so much time reading fanciful love poetry and carefully picking apart every saccharine metaphor.

What he hated more was that he was finally starting to understand them.

“More coffee,” Ten grumbled as he rolled himself out of bed and searched for his clothes.

“Make me one too,” Doyoung called from bed.

“Make it yourself,” Ten said, his tone teasing while his chest ached.

There were many things Ten would do for Doyoung. He would help edit his essays, do just about _anything_ sexually, draft and delete poetry that would never see the light of day, he would even put his heart on the line.

But he wouldn’t make Doyoung coffee. That would be too domestic.


End file.
